Design and simulation of advanced fault tolerant flight control schemes

This research effort describes the design and simulation of a distributed Neural Network (NN) based fault tolerant flight control scheme and the interface of the scheme within a simulation/visualization environment. The goal of the fault tolerant flight control scheme is to recover an aircraft from failures to its sensors or actuators. A commercially available simulation package, Aviator Visual Design Simulator (AVDS), was used for the purpose of simulation and visualization of the aircraft dynamics and the performance of the control schemes.;For the purpose of the sensor failure detection, identification and accommodation (SFDIA) task, it is assumed that the pitch, roll and yaw rate gyros onboard are without physical redundancy. The task is accomplished through the use of a Main Neural Network (MNN) and a set of three De-Centralized Neural Networks (DNNs), providing analytical redundancy for the pitch, roll and yaw gyros. The purpose of the MNN is to detect a sensor failure while the purpose of the DNNs is to identify the failed sensor and then to provide failure accommodation. The actuator failure detection, identification and accommodation (AFDIA) scheme also features the MNN, for detection of actuator failures, along with three Neural Network Controllers (NNCs) for providing the compensating control surface deflections to neutralize the failure induced pitching, rolling and yawing moments. All NNs continue to train on-line, in addition to an offline trained baseline network structure, using the Extended Back-Propagation Algorithm (EBPA), with the flight data provided by the AVDS simulation package.;The above mentioned adaptive flight control schemes have been traditionally implemented sequentially on a single computer. This research addresses the implementation of these fault tolerant flight control schemes on parallel and distributed computer architectures, using Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) sockets and Message Passing Interface (MPI) for inter-process communication.